Bring on the Night

A Canon EOS 400D. Right now these are a bargain at around 3700,- kr with a 450,- kr canon cash-back guarantee. This means a cool SLR at about 3300,-kr. Can’t beat that.

The downside is the kit lens being somewhat mediocre, but guess my “talents” won’t ever challenge that anyway.

Hopefully I will get it tomorrow, or at least before July, where the vacation goes to photogenic Norway with Kojak and his soon to be “bride” alias the puny and way inferior Nikon D60… erhm. I have to admit that it looks pretty cool too, but its too rich for my blood these days. Also not that good a bargain atm at 1200,-kr more than the the comparable EOS 400D (which is generation older though). Anyway: grats on your new honey – Kojak.

Suddenly it looks like it won’t be a eat and drink vacation as normally?

Tags: camera, eos 400d

Finally got the gallery working again. Tried many other gallery plugins in the past, but they all either didn’t work or just sucked due to lack of FTP upload capability.

I have to admit that I kinda given up, until I saw that there was a new upgrade to Lazyest Gallery (the old gallery plugin that died when I upgraded WP to 2.5). So I tried, and it worked!

Seems the real author had disappeared and that some guy took up the torch. Thanks a lot man. He just earned a 15 € donation from yours truly.

So hopefully there will be some updates in the gallery shortly.

If you are interested in the Lazyest Gallery plugin, look here.

Tags: Gallery, Lazyest Gallery

Ok – ok, I may not be a Spike, but I do eat out at times.

As hard as it is to drag C off to a restaurant, I still try to on some rare occasions. Moneys tight at the moment, but that’s expected. We only have one income and therefore have to watch every step we take towards ruin carefully. Well, “ruin” is be a bit harsh, since we’re actually pretty well off considering everything. We still have to be careful with our bucks though.

Restaurant visits are an expensive treat in Denmark, compared to for example China, so we don’t overdo it. Thinking about it, it’s only the 4th time or so that we’ve gone out in the 2 years C has been here. This probably means that I’ve suggested it about 12 times and been turned down. C is not a cheapskate, but she is way more modest and careful with money compared to yours truly. Fortunately I succeeded in dragging her out this time. No matter how much she cringe when she see the bill, she still seem to enjoy the meals. Continue Reading »

Tags: food, Mad Donna, restaurant

Nothing much going on, so picking the easy way out to let you people know, that I’m still alive by posting some random pictures.
Continue Reading »

Tags: life, pictures

Went on a fishing trip for herring last Friday. Didn’t catch anything though. Few did, even though there was plenty of herring out there. I managed to cast pretty long, but turned out that it wasn’t enough to get to where the fish decided to roam.

A Vietnamese guy showed the way, when he turned up with a big grin and an extra long fishing rod, that made a crazy whipping sound when he cast the bait. Being a short guy, he still managed to cast way longer than the rest of the people there (bout 10-15 guys). He was also the only one who shovelled herring in. Often he would get 5 in one cast. His wife showed up after 1 hour and started yakking away in vietnamese. The husband didn’t say much, but started smoking nervously afterwards. I can only imagine what they talked about, but guess it’s a married thing. Then she grabbed the first fish (20 or so) and drove off.

Of all the people there, only one other guy caught something. From what I could figure he was just lucky, since he stood right next to me and didn’t do anything different from what I did. Was there for 3-4 hours and caught nothing. Sigh. Next year, I’ll have to buy new fitting gear.

Tags: fishing, herring

Which one is our apartment?

This is what often greets me on my way home

If you have ever been in China you would know.

Tags: culture differences, home, life

Just when everything gets boring, this is what you get?

Image borrowed from EB

Just as I was about to leave work, I was informed that an apartment had exploded on the same street where we live. Fortunately the news hungry journalists were already there, and had put a picture of the apartment on the net. It wasn’t ours, but in a block about 150m further down the street.

The fire department put out the fire fast. An older woman was a bit shocked, but nothing serious according to the news.

The police sealed off the apartment and still haven’t released anything about what happened.

However, I did ask someone who lives within viewing range of the block, and she told me that it wasn’t the first time that the owners apartment had caught fire. Also plenty of smaller fires had been started since he moved in (just as they wierdly had stopped where he moved from). Continue Reading »

Tags: explosion, home, life

Does this resemble you shopping with the missus?

Unfortunately you can’t hear how the duck wife keeps yakking away and how the duck husband makes grumpy noises while dragged behind.

Tags: duck, men, women

So far C only has this one, but I wouldn’t bet on not seeing any more as we near summer. I could hope for it’s windows fellow to take a bite of it though. It must be pretty hungry as it hasn’t yet caught any flies by itself… yet.

Tags: plant, Tomato

Well, not the exact part of cooking them, but preparing them is a bloody mess. Mostly because I am only allowed the extremely boring part, where you roll the suckers until your whole right arm is numb and your left hand feels like spaghetti. The clever reader adds: “You know it wouldn’t be as hard if you didn’t eat as many Peter?”. Well doh? The YOU try to stop eating those mouth-watering yummies, ok? It’s impossible. The only outcome I have witnessed is that you eat until you’re full and then some. But ok, there may be some picky freckled guy out there somewhere who can only eat 10.

That’s the dilemma of course. They taste bloody great and that C doesn’t whine as much as me when it comes to the work. I’m not saying that it’s because I do the boring harder part and that I’m a whiner, but I’m not saying that it’s a lie either. Continue Reading »

Tags: dumplings, food

A few days ago we took a brief walk and stumbled upon a large willow tree that had broken. The storm recently must have given it the last push. Inside it was completely rotten, so it had to happen sooner or later.

The branches, on the other hand, were fresh and bendy. Just what C’s rabbits love to gnaw in. So I suggested to C that we took some with us home, now that the tree already was on the way to doom. We’ve done so many times before, but I always felt a bit guilty, as it was from fresh and healthy trees.

Who could have guessed C next sentence: “NO! – don’t take from that tree. It’s dirty!”. I looked at the branches and found them no dirtier than those we normally take. They hadn’t touched the ground or anything.

I presented my case and after a while she caved, but not after I reminded her that free living rabbits eat straight from the ground/tree normally and added: “Your rabbits also eat their own shit – you know?”. I knew she couldn’t counter that one. We’ve seen that happen plenty of times. So she agreed to give them the branches, but only after a good thoroughly wash. Sigh. Continue Reading »

Tags: culture differences, rabbits

Found on my desk a few days ago…..

The remote to our old 10″ television in our nerd computer room.

Magically enough it I was able to repair it. Now I just have to find out who did it… hmmmmmm…..

Tags: remote control, wife

WordPress 2.5 is here!

Haven’t had much time to play around with it, but so far it looks cool and seemed to work without any problems. If you haven’t already noticed, it has a huge rebuff of the old a dashboard layout and it looks good in my opinion. Now I just need to learn my way around it, but I don’t think that will much of a problem.

If you haven’t already upgraded, check it out here.

You could also check out the layout in a video here if you’re not 100% sure whether to upgrade or not.

Tags: version 2.5, wordpress

So I’ve deactivated my Facebook account.

It was momentarily fun in the beginning, but now it’s just another time-consuming site of endless challenges, stupid cyber back-pats and invitations to unimportant tests (no offence to those who sent those, cause I found them funny at the beginning too). I just figured that I would try such stuff elsewhere if I really wanted to.

I don’t blame Facebook for trying to keep people interested, but for me it has worked just the opposite. I liked the initial idea of keeping in touch with people I don’t see often though. That part is cool. Unfortunately it is overshadowed by the flashy, colourful stuff that fills 99% of all Facebook accounts (including my own).

To me Facebook has become a bit similar to a dating site where it may be fun to find that other people are interested in you, but even that gets boring after a while. And when stuff is boring, it’s just extra work. Continue Reading »

Tags: facebook

Yet one of them popular follow-ups on our trip to China the summer of 2007.

My wife’s sister is a private tutor in writing and drawing. She’s very talented at drawing and as I later found out, she also writes beautifully. She works through all vacations and weekends to make an extra buck.

When we visited last summer, we slept in her apartment. Meanwhile she stayed at her parents. The apartment was also the same spot where her pupils were taught, and since it was during vacation, she educated them there every day. This meant waking up to the noise of youngsters shouting and making noise until they were finally seated and put to work.

Her apartment had 2 bigger rooms, so she couldn’t keep an eye on all the students at the same time. At one point I took a quick glance at what one of the students was working on. This particular student was there to learn how draw. A part of this exercise was to draw a box of straight lines without any tools. All you could use, was a special technique, your eyesight and a steady hand. Continue Reading »

Tags: cheat, China, school

Yeah yeah, it was hard to come up with a headline… so what.

2 days ago this blog was spammed with 256 comments from the same IP. It was the usual stuff offering me easy access to online casinos, “medicine” sellers and you know the drill.

I have no idea how it happened. Usually ReCaptcha does a good job at keeping these at bay, but something went wrong. It took me 30 minutes to delete them all manually. Yup – it pissed me off. So even though I hope it was a temporary glitch in ReCaptcha, I felt I had to enable Akismet immediately again.

Hopefully I can turn this off again soon, when I have 30 minutes extra if it fails.

Tags: protection, spam, wordpress

In a few days, I’ll be going back to my nerdish roots, and join with some old buddies in what is said to be Denmark’s biggest LAN gaming event. Well, actually, this time it’s only for 450 people, but normally its 800 and up.

3 years ago I did this 2 times every year and helped arrange and carry out the tournaments. Since C came into my life, I have said no every time I was asked, but this time I just had to go and check it out. I have no plans on going back to the organization permanently again. It takes too much of my free time, and now C is more important to me.

The event has grown enormously since I left. When I participated, it was about 50-400 people and there were no sponsors and such. Now everything is planned to the tiniest detail and there are shops where companies can buy a few days with the nerds target group. Continue Reading »

Tags: counter-strike, nerd, slap live

So I finally watched Lust, Caution. The naughty western version of course.

Yes – it has some naked skin, a pair of breasts, and sure it do show some hair from downstairs. There’s also a flash some balls on work, but really nothing that bad compared to what we normally can see here in movies in Denmark. Sure it’s a bit raunchy for China, but then again, if any Chinese is surprised what they saw in this version, they may not have had sex visited a public bath. But of course I’ve never seen anyone have sex in a public Chinese bath…. yet.

I still don’t get exactly why this would end Wei Tang’s career in China. Especially since the version allowed in China, is cleaned for the worst “dirt”. But then again, knowing China, why shouldn’t it? My best guess is that it must have been the political twist of her falling in love with a ruthless Japanese sympathizer, that gave her the death blow. Not the fact that she showed a bit of goodies. Continue Reading »

Tags: career, Caution, Lust, movie, Wei Tang

According to this news, Wei Tang is now being boycotted in the Chinese medias. One can only wonder why, but the obvious reason would be her “betrayal” in the movie Lust, Caution, where she end up having a relationship with a ruthless Japanese sympathizer.

There’s also a few naughty scenes in the western cut version, which caused quite a stir.

According to Danish news, Ang Lee, who produced Lust, Caution, does his best to defend her by saying that she did a good job in the movie and that he would try to support her during this tough time.

If this is the biggest problem in China, I’d say that a few Chinese fabricated Mohammed cartoons would work wonders for the newspapers. Sigh…..

Tags: career, Caution, Lust, movie, Wei Tang

My graphics card started acting up the other day, so decided to do something about it and bought a new one before I killed the entire PC.

Of course it wouldn’t work with my mainboard (an AsRock VSTA “transition” board with both AGP and PCI-E ports). So I had to give up and buy a new one too. Not exactly what we needed now that we just survived the crazy expense of January including a new bed at 7000DKR (about 1400USD).

What sucked the most is that my new Mainboard does not support internal raid, but only external. I never heard of this, and therefore didn’t spot that one before I tried to reinstall my raid disks. So now I’m raidless which sucks.

So my system is now this:

• Core 2 Duo 2.1Ghz (overclocked to 2.4Ghz)
• 2GB DDRII5400 ram
• 2 x 80Gb Seagate 7200 hard disks
• 2 x 160Gb Maxtor 7200 hard disks
• MSI 8800GT 512Mb OC from factory
• 21″ Samsung CRT monitor

Cool enough to get new and up-to-date gear, but rather wouldn’t have spend the doe yet.

Tags: computer, crash, motherboard, MSI 8800GT 512Mb OC